Thursday, February 08, 2007

Things Just Don't Translate


Translations, translations, translations. They can't be explained too easily. Let's take "my name is" in Slovak. You would say it like this, "Volam sa". I you translate this back to English literally, it would be, "I call myself" If your asking someone age you would say, "kolko maš rokov?" or "How many years do you have?" Words like grandmother or grandfather are translated to "old mother" and "old father". The word "auto" means car, so what does "autobus" mean. Bus! Some improper English is proper in Slovak. "Ja nikdy nemam nič" means, "I never don't have nothing". Double negatives are proper Slovak. You can sometimes have triple, quadruple, or more negatives. The word for light in Slovak also means easy. My Slovak teacher once told me to do something and said, "It is light, is it not?" Slovaks would not say, "Do you like it?", they say "Do you have like it". That was odd to hear the first time I was in Slovakia. So if you ever learn a foreighn language, don't expect literal translations all the time.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Deutsch-English


Having a German student in my class I find that if my my predictions are correct, (and this could be a rather obvious statement for some history people) German came out of English or English came out of German. I think this because I have heard words like "unt, nacht, schwimmen, winter, mann, butter, bier, or wetter. These words translated means, (in order of listing above) and, night, swim, winter, man, butter, beer, or weather. Now some words sound totally different like (I will give translations after the word) Gift-poison, wald-forest, kopf-head, schmrez-pain, or baum-tree. find it amazing that if you listen clostly to what they are saying, you actually uunderstand one or two words then that gives you the basic gist of the thought or sentence. I also think that German (with all due repect to all Germans) is one of the choppiest languages. I do think that "to je(ye) pero" or "this is a pen" sounds smoother that "das ist griffel" I think that this shows how languages can be similar in many ways.